The Need for Commonwealth and the Common Protocol

Commonwealth and the Common Protocol were created out of a growing need to bring different on-chain communities and projects together to facilitate collaboration and governance. It’s a one-size-fits-all protocol for different communities to discuss, vote on, and then fund projects, all from a single platform. This enables users and communities to keep up with proposals, discussions, on-chain events, and critical projects, so that none are ever missed again. 

What Exactly is the Commonwealth?

Commonwealth is already used by several prominent protocols, such as HydraDX, Osmosis, and Edgeware, along with some of the biggest names in DeFi, such as Polygon and Terra.. Commonwealth is an all-in-one tool to bring together different utilities of platforms, such as Telegram, Snapshot, and Discord, in one convenient online ecosystem. This allows for seamless community discussions, decentralized governance, and treasury management to be easily managed and facilitated. 

The protocol is already generating significant interest and secured investments from ParaFi, Framework, Dragonfly Capital, Balaji, Hashed, AAVE, Set Protocol, Osmosis, Marlin, and Web3 Foundation, to name a few. 

Simplifying Community Governance 

Commonwealth is making community governance far more manageable by bringing together four different tools in one application. 

• Off-chain polling/On-chain voting – Commonwealth allows you to access all participants through a single platform, regardless of whether you are using Snapshot, Native Layer-1 contracts, or COMP Governance contracts. 
• Crowdfund – Through Commonwealth, you can crowdfund new tokens and community incentives. 
• An informed forum – Forums on Commonwealth allow you to discuss funding and other critical protocol decisions. These forums are inspired by Discord, with built-in reactions and markdowns. 
• On-chain notifications – On-chain notifications ensure that you can always stay updated about major on-chain events 

Thanks to these features, Commonwealth has several use cases. Some of the more common uses are the following: 

• Communities – Communities can manage integrated forums by acting as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Communities can also be divided into private, public, and gated communities. Private communities consist of individuals who use only their addresses as their identity while building projects, ensuring complete privacy. Gated communities are where token holders can use the tokens to exercise their vote and govern the forum. Public communities are where the community carries out all governance regarding the protocol through a community coin. 
• Projects – Communities on Commonwealth can initiate crowdfunding campaigns that are similar to Kickstarter funding initiatives. 
• Collectives – Commonwealth allows communities to form collectives that can pool capital for any project into a fund. 
• Bounties – Users and communities can create bounties that allow them to earn NFTs and tokens as rewards. 

The team behind Commonwealth comes with the expertise of having worked on and launched Edgeware, the first smart contract platform and decentralized protocol on Polkadot. 

Other Competitors 

Other “protocol management” solutions are similar to Commonwealth. These work on the same principle of allowing different on-chain communities access to a protocol, making it simpler for users and communities to discuss, vote, fund, and frictionlessly participate in the protocol’s governance. Some of Commonwealth’s main competitors include: 

• Snapshot
• Tally
• Boardroom.

While these tools address some of the issues with decentralized governance, none of them are as integrated and complete as the Commonwealth.

Key Differentiators

Facilitating Governance

Commonwealth was created to facilitate governance and the processes of all compatible decentralized communities through its UI (user interface), which is easy to use and understand and fully capable of handling governance. Commonwealth comes with community analytics, off-chain to on-chain governance, custom branding, and notifications. All discussions on the protocol are conducted using threads, similar to the functionalities offered on Reddit. This format of discussions ensures that participants are always aware of essential conversations, questions, and answers circulating amongst one another. 

Community Benefit

Community discussions on a single platform ensure that conversations are kept track of when transitioning from the ideation to governance phase. Funding projects also becomes easier through crowdfunding, treasuries, community collectives, and grant programs. Communities in the Commonwealth benefit from gaining exposure to one another and the unique abilities of each community. If a community requests a special ability, other communities on the protocol can also access it, ultimately sharing in the wealth. 

Protocol Silos 

Protocols used by communities are often siloed and don’t have features like Markdown, API, and SEO support. Commonwealth removes the silos that isolate protocols, such as Telegram and Discord, through integrations for bridges and webhooks. 

Anytime Access 

Users and communities can access the most critical features of the protocol and other on-chain actions like voting and staking, no matter which platform the protocol is built on. Commonwealth has integrated with several platforms, such as NEAR, Substrate, Ethereum, Cosmos, etc. Commonwealth is also specifically designed for use by open-source projects and ecosystems. It also ensures and encourages this openness, allowing new members to discover their applications and protocols through SEO.